Mindows ( Tiny Win9x ) Installation

I'm pleased to announce that Boot-land has graciously offered to host a page devoted to winimization ( http://www.winimize.com ).

I have received many questions relating to the setting up of a Win9x based installation as small as 7 Meg. After having created a means of installing a setup of approximately 18 Meg, I have moved on to other projects, but think that a forum such as this could be invaluable to those encountering problems during or after setup.

I have received many questions concerning topics such as USB or CD booting, CD writing, changing the keyboard to another language, etc. etc. I will be willing to help with some of these difficulties, but would really prefer that the community of users take on the task of helping to explain some of the fine points necessary to meet specific needs.

Thus, I would recommend that we start by asking questions about specific problems encountered in setting up Mindows, and hope that these threads will evoke responses on the part of those who have overcome these same problems. It is my hope that after a while this forum will assume a life of its own.

Thanks boot-land, and best to all --- winimizer (mike of winimize.com)

I love it. Been a hard geek for many a decade. The setup was simple and the install was quick.

I did have to figure out oddities of my own system which is Dell Optiplex 755, but seems to run very impressively through the install.

The only real hick up I have had is that silly second stage installation. So after is loads all the files and then wants to reboot for the first time to set everything. Well the mouse and keyboard just go all piss.

Now the lights are all on and they did work during the first part of the install by calling the install.bat.

However I promise dos drivers or a naked no config.sys or autoexec.bat loading anything will literally have the mouse and keyboard frozen as soon as the gui wakes up after the installation reboot.

Now the keyboard and mouse are both usb and actually are stock from the dell company for this exact machine. Nothing crazy here.

I been rolling through the msdet.inf file as (I could be wrong, but really looks like it) is the file that tells the install what kind of hardware to look for. This could explain why I get a prompt that a ps/2 mouse was not detected and I should plug one in. That would be impossible as the machine has none.

So I was thinking of pulling a win98se plain install but halt the install right after the initial install reboot to see what I could pull off to see why this very nice mini does not do what the vanilla does no problem. Of course even then I have to always butcher the system.ini between stage 1 and 2 as this machine has 2 gb ram and a bunch of hd tuning options.

If anyone has insight as to where to look or documents I could read to figure this out. I would be happy to work on adding a mod that would simply ask on reboot for the first time if the keyboard and mouse were usb or not etc.

Enjoy the work will be contributing or forking if the original author(s) are kind of done with it.

Just for the record, a common phrase you will read on this and other similar technical boards is "OMG, it's a Dell! :w00t:" as for *whatever* reason the good Dell guys have usually a tendency to do something on their machines that breaks *any* project otherwise working fine on *any* other machine.

First thing with these kind of oldish machines (and OS) would be to play a bit in the BIOS settings, sometimes there are a few USB related settings that *randomly* toggled/untoggled allow to complete an install.

Don't know/cannot remember if *something* was done in it to make the install more compatible with USB HID's compared to the base Mindows.

If I were you I would also consider (depending if it is just a test or you are setting up a "durable" Mindows machine) the idea of procuring a DELL PS/2 adapter, they can be usually be found for a few bucks, though they are seemingly not very common nowadays, example: